The Formation of a Magnetosphere with Implicit Particle-in-Cell Simulations

We demonstrate the improvements to an implicit Particle-in-Cell code, iPic3D, on the example of dipolar magnetic field immersed in the flow of the plasma and show the formation of a magnetosphere. We address the problem of modelling multi-scale phenomena during the formation of a magnetosphere by implementing an adaptive sub-cycling technique to resolve the motion of particles located close to the magnetic dipole centre, where the magnetic field intensity is maximum. In addition, we implemented new open boundary conditions to model the inflow and outflow of plasma. We present the results of a global three-dimensional Particle-in-Cell simulation and discuss the performance improvements from the adaptive sub-cycling technique.